News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the White House shortly before two o’clock on the afternoon of December 7. Roosevelt was sitting in his second-floor study with longtime friend and adviser Harry Hopkins, eating an apple. Fala was munching the lunch leftovers from a tray on the president’s desk. Though it was a cold, windy afternoon, Roosevelt still hoped to enjoy a ride through the Virginia countryside before nightfall. Then the call came through from Secretary Knox: “Mr. President, it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”
At Griffith Stadium several miles to the north, a sparse crowd of 27,000 shivering fans was watching the Washington Redskins battle the Philadelphia Eagles in the last game of the NFL regular season. A few minutes after the game began, the reporter covering the game for the Associated Press received a puzzling message from AP headquarters, instructing him to keep his story short. Then he got another call: “The Japanese have kicked off. War now!” The news made its way through the press box, then spread to the fans sitting nearby. Redskins management chose not to make a general announcement—“We don’t want to con- tribute to any hysteria,” the team’s general manager later explained—but midway through the first quarter, the public-address system began paging military and diplomatic officials, asking them to return to their stations or contact their offices. By the end of the first half, only one news photographer remained along the sideline.
'It came in slowly—disjointed, fragmentary, contradicting itself now and then.'
Alerted by Roosevelt, presidential press secretary Stephen Early telephoned the three major press associations from his home in northwest Washington and gave them the official announcement at 2:22 p.m. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air, and all naval and military activities on the island of Oahu,” he told them. Reporters quickly gathered in the overheated, garishly lighted Executive Office pressroom, which became the de facto news center of the nation. Throughout the afternoon, Early provided updates as the president (who was meeting with a steady stream of advisers in the White House library) passed along the grim reports from Hawaii—as much as military officials were willing to disclose. After each bulletin, dozens of journalists scrambled for one of the few available telephones. Several radio stations and networks set up microphones in the pressroom. High upon one wall, they could see through the clouds of tobacco smoke an old sign perched atop a bookcase: We Ain’t Mad With Nobody.
It was a cold Sunday in New York, too, but that didn’t stop a...
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar